Epidemagogue

Epidemagogue explores ideas of infection and human agency in a tightly networked society. It uses capacitance touch sensing and cellular automaton behaviors to allow participants to spread imagery across the network of bones through physical contact with the work. Multiple participants may engage with the work to compete or co-operate for territory. We believe that the conjunction of sculptural forms, sensor/ reaction algorithms, and time-based media are uniquely suited to explore the human body as the site of competing epistemologies - the universal knowledge of scientific endeavor , conscious meaning spawned by personal memory and experience, and unconscious meaning inherited from the collective.We started this piece, late in 2015, before the word ‘demagogue’ earned such fluency. It was influenced by the archaeological discovery of evidence of a pre-historic massacre near Lake Turkana, Kenya. This discovery pre-dated earlier finds and reignited the debate on the origins of war.